© Copyright 2007 by silli_artie@hotmail.com
This work may not be reposted or redistributed without the prior
express written permission of the author.
A work of fiction, meant for adults. Read something else if you are
not an adult, or are offended by stories with sexual content. Then
again, if all you’re looking for is in-out, in-out, in-out, you
should probably read something else. I welcome constructive comments.
Enjoy.
Getting there
I checked through security easily, making my way to our ship. Standing inside the docking bay looking at our ship, I had the weird feeling that I could look over to one side and see two dudes going after each other with light sabers... Nah, this was a friendly environment, and we had a much prettier ship. As to the stability of the crew, who knows?
I stepped on to the ship, telling Eliza to close and secure the hatch. On to the bridge.
And I almost backed out!
There, sitting in the co-pilot’s seat was a curly blonde-haired, fair-skinned wet dream! She turned to look at me, and smiled -- blue eyes, pillow lips, a gravity-defying DD bustline. “I’m Tundi, your drone,” she introduced herself with assertiveness concomitant with her bust size.
I took a breath. Not quite what I’d encountered in simulations... I moved to my seat, secured, and brought up displays as I linked in. “Status?” I asked.
When I didn’t get a reply, I looked to Tundi. God... Or was that Goddess? Beautiful, bountiful -- the name rang a bell somehow, but I couldn’t quite place it. Not important right now. “What is our status?”
When she replied with a lusty smile, I told her, “If you’re going to take that seat, I expect you to do more than warm it. Can you handle the duties of co-pilot?”
She raised an eyebrow. “Yes. All checklists complete and clear. We have clearance to depart on AI control to the jump point. When you are ready. Sir.”
“Thank you,” I told her, focusing on the task and ignoring that last barb. I brought up a display of our expected course. Like most orbitals, this one insisted on AI control in and out. I did a top-level review, verifying, linking to deeper level displays with Eliza.
“I said, we’re complete and clear,” Tundi said with evident irritation.
I looked to her again. “Thank you,” I told her. And she’s a drone, run by Eliza?
“Are you separate from Eliza?” I asked when I’d run the lists to my satisfaction.
She made a face, chortling. She held up a shapely hand. “Is your thumb separate from your bird finger? From your nose? Who is asking, and does it matter?” She placed shapely thumb to shapely nose and wiggled her fingers at me, sticking out her tongue. She was also sticking out other very shapely parts...
Ah, this was going to be interesting... “Eliza,” I said out loud, “Please thank our hosts for their hospitality, and take us to the jump point.”
Tundi smirked.
Eliza’s voice came from above our heads, “Thank you, we are underway.”
I turned to look forward, bringing up composite displays, monitoring traffic as we made our way out from the orbital and the close-in traffic, out to clearer regions and accelerating, moving up and out of the ecliptic plane. Minor inertial sensations as motion cues, as we’d requested. Not a lot of traffic, we weren’t in a really crowded system. I’d done simulations of those! That’s why AIs handle things!
I reviewed FTL transition and course information as we approached the jump point, and gave my okay to proceed. A brief sensation and a shift on the viewscreens to computed images marked the transition. Damn, how many centuries would it take Man to get to that point, if he didn’t snuff himself out beforehand?
Smooth sailing -- Eliza could handle things for the duration of the trip, a few days, assuming all went nominally. Yeah, just like with the spiders...
I checked systems. Kay was in our quarters with her drone, with the equivalent of a “do not disturb” sign hung out. But she was also marked available in case of an emergency.
Eliza threw in that I was free to leave the bridge if I so desired.
I turned and looked, looked into blue eyes, those soft lips, and that figure... I so desired!
“What are your duties as my drone?” I asked, trying to suppress a smirk.
She didn’t try... “Why don’t we go discuss them?” she gleefully smirked.
I unclipped and said formally, “Leaving the bridge.”
Wow... Watching her, following her -- she was maybe an inch taller than me, and very shapely -- what had Huxley said? “Pneumatic?” Deliciously pneumatic... We went into the cabin designated for the drones. The lights dimmed as we entered. Large soft-looking horizontal surface nearby. I brushed my hand over the fasteners for my jumpsuit, opening them. She smiled and did the same on hers. I moved closer.
The lights went out. Didn’t matter. Oh so soon it was skin against skin, moving to horizontal. She smelled delicious, tasted better. Her kisses were warm, moist, energetic. As I ran my hands over her, and she did the same to me, her nipples demanded more attention.
I was lost as soon as my lips made contact. So delicious, and so responsive! I squeezed her, she squeezed me, and soon I was on my back. She rode me, moving me between her lips and her breasts, some times smothering me. I held on, enjoying the ride, holding her waist, pulling us together.
She shuddered and moaned atop me, spasming around me. “Now you’re going to get it,” she growled, holding me to a nipple. She swirled her hips as her muscles contracted around me, pulling me deeper into her. I moaned and held on. I passed the point of inevitability, and still the sensations built, until she did something, letting me come deep within her.
She cooed and kissed my head as she held me, rocking her hips to tease another spurt from me. We settled in, her arms wrapped around my head holding me where I wanted to be, the bed rocking us gently.
I woke up in soft light with my head nestled between a pair of very nice pillows. “One of my duties,” she whispered as she moved to her back and held me to a nipple at her side, “is to monitor you for systemic imbalances, and to take action to insure those imbalances don’t become a problem.”
I wasn’t sure if she was acting to resolve an imbalance, or to cause one, with one hand holding me to her, and her other hand teasing my cock back to life. She lifted her leg closest to me, letting go of my head, and I moved around a bit, sliding into her as she continued to tease me with her hands, both of us making encouraging noises to the other.
Oh, but her nipples were so far away! She teased me with a fingertip in my mouth, but I wasn’t at all the same, and suddenly she rolled over, moving, and I was on top of her, riding her shapely bottom. Such a delicious cushion for making love! She moaned and rocked, pulling her knees closer. Pounding into her bottom felt so good, holding her waist, pressing deeper as I came, collapsing on to her back, rolling as a unit to our sides, still connected, kissing the back of her neck.
We managed to get up and get cleaned up. My shell seemed to have a greatly reduced recovery time... That and she probably knew how to make the best use of it, better than I did at the time. But we got dressed again, even if I did pull her on top of me for a bit.
Checking status as we left the cabin, Kay and her drone were in the galley. I needed to thank Kay, in more ways than one...
Another shock as we entered the galley -- Kay sitting there, looking smug and satiated, and next to her was a short, smoldering... The look she gave me, I was looking forward to being putty in her arms... Donna is shorter, compact, shapely, long black hair, brown eyes, olive-Mediterranean complexion.
“Oh sit down,” Kay admonished, practically pulling me to sitting next to her. Donna got up and moved to the prep area. Tundi slid next to me on the bench seat, bumping me.
I laughed. What else to do?
Donna returned with a plate of tamales for me. I saw them, smelled them, and my mouth was watering. Don’t remember what I had to drink, or what Tundi ate; the tamales were delicious.
And after that, small talk, planning the next few days until we reached our destination for the retrofit. I had a lot of training to go through, to learn about my new shell and some of the add-ons we had, as well as re-running the simulations for the ship.
I did a chunk of the simulations after lunch. They were even easier now. During some of the locate/diagnose/replace scenarios, I used our drones, and was glad for Donna’s size -- she could reach things in crowded areas that I couldn’t with her smaller dexterous hands.
The last of the diagnose/replace scenarios had Donna and me in the systems bay, where the factory-standard systems huddled embarrassed in a corner. We’d completed diagnosing a possibly failing module, deciding to leave it in place until it died (Hal was no place to be seen), when all of a sudden I was floating, with a bluish tint around me.
That was my shield popping on, simulating a decompression event. My shield was triggered either on rate of pressure change, or pressure level. The color gave me a clue, and my links provided more information. Very slick stuff -- the shield could go selectively opaque, blocking radiation of just about any wavelength desired (or not desired).
We also worked through some attack/defense sequences, and Donna was fast and nasty! I very quickly learned the utility of popping my shield on, millimeters above my skin and/or clothing. We had very fancy shields -- with them on, we could still use our fingers; less expensive systems gave users something more akin to mittens.
At one point I broke into laughter, momentarily infuriating Donna. I held her close while I tried to recover. I’d been pulling in more data on the systems integrated into our shells, and in response to a thought, I learned how they were powered -- a small converter hooked up to my bladder. I was pee-powered...
When I stopped laughing, I noticed I had a gorgeous female drone in my arms. She wrapped her legs around me and gave me quite the kiss. We practiced different arts, shedding our clothes. Lovemaking in really low gee is like satin sheets, only far worse -- no traction, nothing to push against. Eliza to the rescue, generating a field under us that provided support, and increasing gee to help us along. I was on top, thrusting into Donna, but she was running things, touching me, holding me, and enjoying the process immensely.
I didn’t get to really taste and enjoy her nipples until afterwards, but they were worth the wait. We dressed again and headed forward.
I did some more sims from the bridge.
As we ate dinner later, Kay slyly asked me if I was saving some for her.
Oh yes, I was saving some for her... In our cabin afterwards, I tried to show her.
Some time the next morning, wrapped together, she asked, “You going to spend the whole day there?”
I moved to her other nipple.
She chuckled and held me.
I nestled in between her breasts. “The drones,” I said, trying to formulate a question, “they’re part of Eliza? Why? Why drones, why them?”
Kay gave me a squeeze. “You didn’t seem to mind them,” she told me with a chuckle, and kissed the top of my head. She sighed. “Some of it is tradition. On a pragmatic level, they’re histocompatible -- a handy set of spare parts.” I moved a bit in her arms. She laughed and squeezed me again. “Most parts -- we’re talking survival, at that level. Many other functions as well, such as keeping us balanced, providing a rich environment, giving Eliza more eyes and hands... as well as other parts...” she chuckled.
I sighed. “Do they ... she ... does somebody orgasm?”
“Do you? Or are you just simulating it?”
Hmpf. Still, a good response. “Certainly felt like they were.”
“Oh, I’m certain it felt that way to them as well. They’re engineered for it, just like you are, sweetie.”
I decided not to explore that further, and she decided to squeeze me and hold me where I wanted to be.
But eventually we had to get up; we had things to do.
While some systems were to be ripped out and replaced, others weren’t, and I needed to learn them inside-out. The ones to be gutted I just needed to learn as well as the back of my hand... Our shuttles were going in for the refit as well, and would end up with capabilities on the order of what the ship had now. Some of the sims I ran were easy, some were exhausting. One interesting aspect that caused some internal dissonance -- and I think that’s why I got to run so many of those -- in case of a real emergency, of dire circumstances, the drones, Tundi and Donna, were expendable. It took me a while to learn that, and even if I did, that didn’t mean I had to like it.
I also worked closely with my shipmates, very closely, moving, dancing, adapting what I’d learned in the nest to my new shell. Eliza, Tundi, Donna had different personalities. And yes, quite different tastes. Don’t know about Eliza, but Kay, Donna, and Tundi all tasted different, and delicious. Kay and Tundi were more amenable to long-term snuggling, as an example. More of a physical bond with Tundi and I, while Kay and I extended past the physical to more intellectual. More intellectual -- Kay teased me more, while Tundi shut off my mind. I wasn’t complaining!
Cepmod I
The four of us were on the bridge as we entered the Mekk system. I was nominally in command, with Kay next to me. Eliza reported initial contact, confirmed our destination, and took us in on the metric drive at a leisurely 0.75C.
The Cep had their own orbital -- business must be good.
Ooh -- incoming encrypted comm traffic for Kay. Different expressions crossed her face.
Kay shook her head and turned to me. “I’m afraid you’re going to be on your own -- I need to meet with some of my people.” She smirked. “But it’s good news -- lining up fun for us down the road.” Then a sigh. “I hope you don’t mind?”
“I’ll survive,” I told her, thinking about spending time with Tundi. “How long is this retrofit supposed to take?”
“Nine days,” she told me, “followed by a short shakedown, tune-ups, if any, then we go off for a while and play. When we’re satisfied, we’ll do a recert.”
I nodded. “And then it’s fun and games?”
She gave me a look. “Oh, we’ll have plenty of fun along the way...” She got up, and pulled me to my feet.
I hugged her, but she pulled back a bit. “You need to pack a bag -- we need to be off the ship. Let’s go,” she told me.
Now I was getting worried. The drones were tied to the ship. But we went to our cabin and I packed a small bag. “We talked about a tablet, for notekeeping, image capture, that kind of thing,” I mentioned, contemplating a few days on my own.
Kay nodded. “I arranged it with Saba.”
“Saba?”
“He’s our interface for this job. The Cep ... you’ll see -- they work through interfaces chosen to match the client.”
Eliza’s voice sounded in my head, and I suppose, Kay’s, “Docked. Suspending drones.”
Kay gave me a hug. “Let’s go. They’re undoubtedly waiting to start.”
We walked arm in arm to the main hatch and left the ship.
Our ship was surrounded by a framework, and that framework was liberally populated by silvery humanoid folk about a meter tall. “Cep?” I asked Kay.
“Yes -- and there’s Saba.”
Tall bluish chap, augmented? “Welcome! May we begin?” he asked in a melodious voice.
Kay looked to me and smiled.
“Please begin,” I told him.
I thought I heard something behind me. I turned and saw pieces of the hull floating away, and Cep swarming in, on, around, and through our ship!
“If you will follow me,” Saba said, and turning to Kay added, “Your transfer is ready.”
We walked along and through a dock, entering a standard-looking office or industrial environment. A uniformed bluish female walked up to Kay. Kay gave me a hug, whispered, “Stay out of trouble!” to me, and walked off with the female.
Saba looked at me.
“Kay suggested I speak with you about a tablet?”
He nodded. “Yes, we have one prepared. It has been suggested that you visit the Museum while we complete our tasks.”
“I haven’t decided quite what to do yet,” I admitted.
“Shall we make arrangements for the Museum?”
I like museums, and it seemed to be highly recommended. Why not? “Yes, please.”
He indicated a direction; I followed him.
He glanced to me as we walked. “We request permission to access the records for the shell you are wearing.”
“Permission granted,” I told him. Hell, they had complete physical access to the ship.
“Thank you.” A pause. “While the work on your shells is first rate, we recommended some minor changes and additions to your colleague; we can perform these modifications on your shell at no charge if you are interested.”
“Yes, please.”
“Good. We have confirmation from the Museum; their shuttle schedule gives us time for the required work. This way, please.”
Into a medical room, recline on my back, blink!
Wow! Things look different -- sharper? I did something, I guess thinking about it, and I had all the information -- among other things, they’d replaced my eyes. Sharper, programmable, and more -- by thinking about it I could shift wavelength sensitivity and response, focus, and more; magnification, amplification, filtering, automatic leveling, image processing, you name it! And most of the time, I didn’t have to do a thing. Oh, and I could easily kick everything off, or do blending modes to see just what the processing was doing.
I paid attention to the med tech next to me. She led me through exercises familiarizing me with my new eyes. Another tech brought in my new tablet. Looked just like tablets I’d seen others carrying on a number of worlds and orbitals... Except the finish on this one was cleaner. It also felt a lot more solid.
We spent a few clicks working with the tablet. I could use it as a normal tablet. But linking to it offered a whole lot more. Very powerful, and very secure.
When I linked to it, I could interact at the accelerated pace I’d experienced in the sims -- interacting, manipulating, so fast and so effortlessly! We went through more exercises, acquainting me with my new friend. We added analytical tools for physics and math; they made my life a lot easier. Well, part of my life -- they took the drudgery out of symbol manipulation and managing sets of equations. The creative part was still as difficult as ever.
“You adapt to the interface very quickly,” the tech told me. “We can open up the interface and provide you with materials so that you can explore this mode in greater detail if you would like.”
“Yes, please,” I requested.
They changed some things and we did some more exercises. Interesting -- some of it was concentration, and some of it was just letting things happen, and happen they did, quickly!
Museum
The shuttle arrived to take me to the surface, and the Museum. Saba led me to the shuttle bay. “You show aptitude in linking with these systems,” he told me, waving at my tablet. “Please contact us if you have questions along those lines. I hope you find your visit interesting.”
I was sure I would. I thanked him and boarded the little shuttle.
The shuttle itself was small, efficient, and remotely piloted. We took a leisurely route to the surface, providing the opportunity to acquaint myself with the Museum and decide where to start.
I brought up a display on my tablet. The science area alone was the size of a city -- no, it was a city!
I decided to do Space Propulsion. That was applied math and physics, and would tie together a lot of things, all right up my alley. It was either that, or Music.
Did I require a guide? I viewed the Museum overview, and I’m glad I did. The place was open all the time. My multi-day admission, courtesy of the Cep, included lodging, meals, and AI guides; live guides were extra. When I was tired or hungry, all I needed to do was signal, and a carrier would be sent for me, and would return me to the same place later, if that’s what I wanted. Amazing! And, I could walk, or ride a carrier, essentially a floating chair. I could also have a carrier follow me, walking when I wanted. That sounds like the way to go.
I made my selections. When the shuttle hatch opened, I was at the entrance to the small-town sized area on space flight, a carrier waiting for me, my tablet letting me know I could start.
Anterooms, overview areas -- I moved, not too quickly, to the propulsion area. The guide systems were adaptive AI based, which was also nice. When I wanted more detail, I got it, and they remembered for the next time!
And what a wild mix of recapitulation and learning!
Ah, let’s start at the beginning... Reaction drives -- the difference between early Chinese skyrockets and Apollo Saturn V was one of scale, right? Expel reaction mass, and Newton’s laws predict the result. Reaction mass goes one way, rocket goes the other.
The next step, impulse or thruster drives, happens once you have a theory integrating electromagnetism through quantum mechanics and gravity. Look back at the reaction drive. Write the field equations for what happens. Now generate the fields directly, without resorting to all that messy reaction mass.
I wanted more detail. I’d gotten the operational view of basic thruster drives on the Spider ship, but not the theoretical basis. I got more detail! I got detailed models in my tablet, models I could manipulate, simulate, and explore!
Impulse/thruster drives are more efficient than reaction drives, liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen combining at tons per second to lift those three men to the moon.
But when you step back, lifting a kilogram of mass to escape velocity (11.2 km/sec on Earth) takes a certain amount of energy. You still need a certain number of joules of energy (megajoules) to get that kilogram to escape velocity.
Impulse/thruster drives are efficient by comparison, but you still need megajoules to get off that damn rock. They overcome the inefficiencies of chemical reactions, but don’t get around the work (the integral of F ds) required.
Oh so many dead ends and detours -- little improvements, little dodges.
And you still have limits -- the speed of light. In physics, theories are seldom replaced, mostly refined. That’s what happened with Newtonian mechanics, the advance of the perihelion of Mercury a thorn in the side of Newtonian Mechanics, and the birth of Einstein’s Relativity.
The next jump, to the stars, is a big one.
Take a map -- continental United States, say, and measure from Los Angeles to Boston. A long ways, right? 45 centimeters or so as the ruler measures it on the map.
Now fold the map in vertical strips a few centimeters wide. Push a pin through the folded map at Los Angeles. Push another pin through the folded map at Boston. Now how far apart are the pins? Just a few centimeters!
Just a few centimeters, a fraction of the original distance -- if you can figure out how to jump between the folds, moving through the paper. That’s the trick. That’s the challenge. How to move outside the paper, jumping through it, through the folds.
Call it projective geometry, folded adaptive spaces, branes -- there are lots of ways.
Another way -- take your map and roll it into a cylinder, doing the same pin tricks and connecting them. Draw a line between the start and end points. Construct a perpendicular to that line. Now roll the cylinder with its axis along that perpendicular -- and our two cities appear on a circle, the distance between them a maximum of the diameter.
Another way -- wad the map into a ball. Wad it up and squash it. Squash it good and tight. Maximum distance between any two points on the map is the diameter of the ball.
Lots of ways to do it, and they all require huge amounts of energy.
Taxonomy
Early on my third day, I found the first reference. I’d moved into the big section on FTL systems. The fourth or fifth example I saw, I recognized the same descriptive framework. I queried the Museum’s AI: are these part of a larger work?
Bingo! An almost century-old taxonomy of FTL systems! A group of researchers labored for a decade putting the thing together. One hundred four major FTL systems with numerous variations on some of them. And oh my, models of each. And now I had it on my tablet, to study, simulate, and poke at.
After a short period, I gave up -- I was spending more time with my head in the taxonomy than looking at exhibits -- I had the carrier take me back to my room, where I could work through this amazing resource uninterrupted and at an accelerated pace.
I got a warning after some number of subjective hours, thirty or forty or so. I needed to take care of my body; sitting for so long wasn’t good! I took a break for the loo, to eat, exercise a bit, and then reclined on the sleeping pad to continue working.
Much better! I didn’t need to sleep in that subjective space, and since my body was resting, I could work through material at a furious pace!
Drat! What now? My tablet was complaining! I queried the Cep, who offered additional resources, and a more efficient interface. Fine -- do it! Some forty or fifty subjective hours later, I took another break when the Cep (six silver chaps and a taller bluish chaperone) added two pedestal-sized gadgets to my little room, docking my tablet in one. That was the computational part. The other one was life support. They did something to me, too. When I woke, I was floating in a low-gee field, and wow -- I had more capability and speed! Where the early training sims I’d done had been at a ratio of something like twenty to one subjective to objective time, I must have been running at fifty or greater, some times far greater.
Still, I broke every so often to eat, dance and use the loo. I did side research on integration and composites, the art and science of melding man and machine, and adapted -restructured - taught myself how to work smarter, faster, and to do simple things such as overlap bio breaks with the intense work I was doing. That helped a lot.
I devoured the taxonomy. I found and corrected errors, translating and moving the math from a hodgepodge of structures to a different, more appropriate (for me at least) framework. One of the problems, not really an error, was the issue of perspective; where you stand, to a great extent, determines what you see. I had a much different perspective.
After a number of subjective weeks, I hit on it. In the past that taxonomy received criticism that it didn’t really organize things. I’d fixed part of that by moving things to a common, consistent mathematical presentation. Users tended to refer to FTL drive systems in broad categories, such as a spider drive, or a flonker drive. They recognized drives by organizational principals, similarities, not present in the taxonomy. To a certain extent, the taxonomy was pretty cobbled together, with different forms of representation used for different drives, errors, and more. For instance, the taxonomy identified as different two drive systems, developed by different species, that were actually the same, but were presented using different mathematical models, and their physical implantations were wildly different. Still, fundamental principle of operation was the same for both of them.
I needed to shift things to a common ground.
When I figured it out I took a bio break to laugh and dance in Douglas Adam’s honor -- the answer was indeed 42! A three by seven by two organizational structure encompassed and collapsed them all! A few months subjective time with the resources I had, and I’d revised the taxonomy, producing a new analysis that was much more compact.
Oh, at one point along that path I had a checkup call from the Cep. I understood them a lot better -- they were a hivemind; the crowd I’d seen swarming the ship were components of one hivemind; the term “individual” doesn’t apply. I adopted some of their approaches to integrating and making better use of my AI resources, and that helped a great deal. The AI resources I had were like a horde of grad students and postdocs who actually did what you wanted!
I sent a copy of my revised taxonomy to the Museum’s checking AI. It returned after a few subjective days with relatively few comments, and by the way, which of these publishing and distribution offers would you prefer? Working (in accelerated sim time) with the Museum’s AI, and an outside legal representative, we put together a deal which published the revision through the Museum, like the original it was based on, split any revenue, and while it didn’t quite hide my authorship, it made that fact difficult to determine.
I also revised/refined the way I worked; it was a problem of allocation or delegation. Back when I’d been a spider, one brain took care of the body while the other brain did other things -- such as run diagnostic and repair probes when we’d been fixing shredded optical fibers. I could do similar allocating and delegating, so I could work at an accelerated pace and take care of my body, dancing, showering, eating, at the same time. I thought of it as slipstreaming.
The unified presentation, that’s what I worked on. But that wasn’t the good part.
I’d started parallel work, and really dug into it once the revision was completed. What I’d gotten from the Museum, and indeed what I revised, was a taxonomy. It explained what, and how different FTL systems worked Now I had (unpublished) a very clean structure that took the earlier grab-bag list of FTL drives and models and organized them into a unified manner, unified in presentation, in mathematical modeling, and more. But I wanted more than that -- I was interested in sequence, the chronology, the interactions, the evolution. How, when, interacting with what, enabled by what -- that’s the new aspect I explored. Piecing together some of the evolution took digging into other areas of the Museum, dealing mostly with Museum AIs. I threw out queries, usually on the (scientific) history of a particular planet/race, and they came back with responses, or hypotheses, or on occasion further questions from live researchers.
Some of those evolution and interrelationship issues -- the FTL transition requires a lot of energy, transitioning back takes less, and indeed, some can be recovered. In the vast majority of societies developing FTL, early ships were powered by nuclear fusion. Many societies made those first FTL ships work. Then they start noticing the little things, the places where theory didn’t quite match what was observed -- like the advance of the perihelion of Mercury, or that irksome hiss in a microwave receiver. Eventually someone comes along and develops a deeper understanding.
Somewhere along this path three major puzzle pieces come out: (1) Efficient fields, (2) Metric drives, and (3) Total energy conversion. One piece usually initiates the cascade, but in society after society, once one starts being developed, all three tend to pop out in a hurry.
Efficient fields -- force fields for containing a bubble of atmosphere around an individual while they’re outside a ship or in an otherwise unfriendly environment, for containing total energy conversion reactions, for directing energy weapons, for doing so many things. They tend to evolve the same way. As an example, think of bouncing a ball against a wall. Using the best approximations you have, write the field equations describing that interaction. Now replace the wall with a field that does the same thing. Once you’ve got that, (and you can bounce a ball against it), you can alter the field to simulate a wall that is very dense, very strong, you get the idea. Some of the first applications were adaptive shields for ships, shields that protect them from impacts, and adjust their shape to fit the medium/conditions they encounter. Another early application was replacing the massive and power-hungry electromagnetic containment systems for fusion power plants. All of a sudden you go from needing 30% of the fusion plant’s power, and tons of shielding, to a handful of field generators that consume a few watts.
Metric drives represent another shift in thinking. Usually they start with what’s been learned in early FTL drives with the ability to change the reference frame. Why can’t we change the reference frame so this large object responds like an object with the mass of a proton? Or, change the reference frame so this object is moving at 0.75C? Manipulating the metrics of spacetime, the reference frame, produces drive systems still limited by the speed of light, but so efficient -- you can take a fifty thousand ton ship to 0.75C on a few hundred watts!
But flipping out of that original brane/space into a FTL brane, jumping out of the map, still takes enormous energy. With better force fields, fusion sources are a lot lighter, you can initiate fusion using fields, which is really efficient, but there’s still an energy density limit governing size. You need a better energy source.
The next big jump is a dangerous jump -- and most of the time it falls out of pure physics, studying the first few picoseconds of the Beginning of Everything. Given the right conditions, you can turn matter into energy -- all of it, directly. You can also turn energy into matter, so all of a sudden, “rare earth” elements aren’t. It takes very specialized fields and conditions to make the matter to energy transformation. Luckily, it’s hard to make those conditions and fields self-sustaining, so if a converter fails, it won’t take out the planet. You can (and some have, unfortunately) deliberately liberated the energy of a planet or a moon. The results are visible in the sky, some times during daylight from hundreds of lightyears away.
But luckily enough, such events are rare. Direct conversion energy sources are inexpensive, extremely efficient, simple to use, and highly reliable. How would you like a gadget the size of a flashlight battery that turns air into kilowatts?
Once these pieces are combined, FTL systems evolve quickly along a number of paths. One is speed, which is a useful misnomer, commonly misunderstood as the time it takes to get from point A to point B. The less time it takes, the faster you must have gone, right? When your FTL drive operates by finding a projective geometry akin to wadding up a map and moving within it, what do distance and speed mean? But “speed” still fits. And since so many systems fold or project or do whatever to spacetime to get a ship from that point A to point B, using that measure, the “distance” from A to B divided by elapsed time, isn’t so bad an idea.
Another path is efficiency, the amount of energy it takes to get from A to B. Another path is how quiet the drive is, where “quiet” refers to the radiation the drive throws off. Early drives were real stinkers, generating gravity waves and all sorts of problems. Oh, people aren’t just interested in “quiet” drives for ecological reasons -- quiet drives are also harder to detect. Physical size, reliability, complexity are also important. If your FTL drive craps out 60 lightyears from the nearest civilization, you’ve got a long walk!
Some of the advances and resulting drive systems are pretty specialized. When you think about speed, if the grocery store is two kilometers from your house, it doesn’t really matter if you go 20 or 400 kilometers per hour to get there. Well, your neighbors probably prefer you didn’t go 400... And so it is with FTL systems; the really high “speeds” are usually piggyback systems based on another FTL drive, and only useful when you’re in really wide open spaces, like out of your local cluster’s ecliptic plane, or between spiral arms.
I popped back to the “real world” for a break. What a trip! I had a revised and published taxonomy; see how much interest that gets. And I had the two follow-ons: the structured analysis, based on a much cleaner unified mathematical model, and the chronological analysis. Had a feeling those should stay under my hat for a while.
Mid-morning I went back to the Museum and visited a set of exhibits I’d perused mentally, dealing with the chronology on a number of worlds. I’d pulled in references from other worlds, other institutions, fitting things together.
Oho -- a cul-de-sac, a detour, almost missed it -- a wonderful little sidetrack, on an FTL system that didn’t work! I could tell the presentation was from the same folks who’d done the taxonomy, so I slurped up that material. What a hoot! The denizens of this one star system tried a unique approach to FTL, to the problem of moving a ship from one brane to another. Only it didn’t quite work, making a horrendous mess, curdling local space-time. They went back to the drawing board -- trying to contain the nasty side effects in a spherical region. Made it worse! After eighty years of pushing along that path, they backed off and tried another approach, stumbling on one of the better known ones, one of the successful ones. I looked around (including AI searches) for more of those cases, but didn’t find any.
Damn, I needed to get outside for a while... The Museum had a waterfront area, some restaurants and even a water park. Great! Booked a table for dinner, and had the carrier start hauling me to the water park.
On the way, I retrieved info on how the retrofit was proceeding. I got downloads on systems and capabilities. Damn, the primary FTL drive was wicked fast -- and as for the add-on, were we going to visit nearby clusters? Oh, the theories behind them fit nicely into the structure I’d evolved, once you pushed them around a bit, and I started some AIs on that work.
The water park was what I needed. You can build some pretty wild waterslides when you can manipulate gravity! Some folks made sleek, graceful exits from the chutes and into the pools. I had fun, my way -- popping out tumbling and twisting, arms and legs everywhere, whooping and hollering and impacting the water. Had to fine-tune my internal shields so I could experience things at their best, and it was a lot of fun!
After a while I swam to the area where I’d left my tablet, and stretched out under the sun.
Resting, at least in body, slipstreaming back and forth between that accelerated world and the world around me. Hmmm, that trick hijacking the spider ship, the trap fields... How did that fit into my analytic structure of drive systems? A few hours subjective time, a few seconds real time, and I had answers. Not sure I liked the answers, but I had them. Have some AIs push sets of equations around for a while. Okay, the trap works along this line of my analysis, and can be extended for use against these classes of drives. Okay, how do we extend protection? Hmmm, I should probably file for patent protection, extending what I’d done already; get an AI started on that.
Bio break to turn over, and for some refreshment. Okay, my patent claims were registered. Let’s push those ideas around some more. Hmmm -- our primary FTL drive falls into one of the suspect categories. Let’s do some simulations. Yup... A while later I sent a note to the Cep suggesting some minor but important changes to drive field generation, offering that they provided protection against a possible attack. I was also interested in a lot more instrumentation on our drives, being able to measure in detail what the drive was doing.
Dropped back into the real world and watched some adults play toss the young-ones in the water. The young ones made a lot of happy noises. It’s good that some things don’t change.
A daddy picked up a young one, blew loud raspberries in her belly, and to raucous laughter, tossed her squealing and flailing into the air.
Kay’s voice popped into my head, “I thought I told you to stay out of trouble!” And a message from the Cep -- was I available for a conference on the message I’d sent?
Yes...
I found myself in a simulated office setting. I was in my new form, and Kay was in hers as well! A sim of our bluish Cep interface was present, as were two others, wearing generic-looking male forms similar to Kay and me.
Could I explain my request, one of the males asked.
I’d had plenty of practice in the simulated world I’d been working in, so it was easy for me to bring in the models and the math I needed. Recall the unfortunate incident with the Spider ship, the trap fields that yanked it out of its FTL brane?
So what, one of them griped -- this is a completely different drive system.
Oh? I sent a private message to Kay -- I’ve filed patents on some of this stuff, but the rest of it is unpublished, and I’m not sure how valuable it is. Do you trust these characters?
She said to the rest of the group, “This material is confidential.” No gripes, she gave me the go-ahead.
I brought up the model for their drive system as I’d gotten it. I walked through pushing it into what I had been using as a “standard” form, conveniently breezing through some of the tricky bits, and compared that to the Spider drive, showing the commonalities when both drive systems were shown in the same form, including the common vulnerabilities. I showed the results of some simulations of an enhanced trap field and their drive with and without my mods.
I stood there letting them digest. The Cep interface said, “We wish to negotiate including this modification in our products.”
I sent a quick query to Kay, who agreed to do that deal. I suggested the shipyard might be interested as well, and she agreed, adding that she thought what I’d done was first rate.
Someone else was on his toes/peds/whatever. “You published a revision to the Drive Taxonomy. This presentation suggests you have performed additional analysis.”
I nodded and smiled. “That analysis is not available at this time.”
Kay quickly added, “And if you try anything, I will get you where it will not grow back!”
I chuckled. The two males didn’t. Wouldn’t want Kay upset at me, not at all.
“What have you found with respect to the secondary drive?” the interface asked.
“I have not seriously studied that question,” I replied honestly.
“We wish to contract for such a study,” the interface requested.
I’d already guessed the two males had something to do with the drive systems; their miffed expressions cemented that belief.
“Kay?” I suggested.
“We will discuss it on our shakedown and have proposals when we return,” she told him.
“Acceptable,” the interface agreed.
“Anything else?” I asked.
Kay laughed, looking at her colleagues. I liked the tone of that laugh. They didn’t. She looked at me. “See you in a couple of days -- and stay out of trouble!”
“Ook, ook!” I replied, and pulled the plug on my connection. Hey, monkeys cause trouble, right? It’s what we do! Damn -- didn’t ask about the additional instrumentation I’d requested.
Kay caught me in some intermediate place. “What have you done? Where did that analysis come from? Oh my! You did -- you updated that treatise?”
I nodded. “Yes; I’ve been busy, and having fun in the Museum.”
She looked surprised, shocked. “Oh my... You’ve done it again... I’d say keep out of trouble, but I did that already! Damn them!” She gave me a hug and a quick kiss, then pulled the plug on our meeting.
Looking at the family playing in the water, the young one had barely moved in the air, continuing her arc, landing splashing and laughing in the water. Good idea -- I got up to go play.
Dinner was nice ... but alone. Nice live music, a quartet. I walked the nearby beach at sunset/moonrise. Seeing couples walking along the beach, or not walking... I sighed and tried not to laugh out loud. How long had it been? Eight days, objective, but around twelve thousand subjective hours ... of celibacy. Queried Cep for ship status. Our cabin and the drones could be reactivated at any time. Completion in approximately 16 hours; they would need exclusive use of the ship for three hours for initial checks, and then we would do our shakedown run.
Bad habit, slipstreaming as I walked, but I was getting very good at it. Checked with the Museum. Goodies from my room would be in a shuttle waiting for me by the time I reached the restaurant arrival area. Cep orbital acknowledged predicted arrival.
I stooped to pick up some sand, then walked into the surf to get my toes wet once more. Closed my eyes, deep breath through my nose, staying in this moment, the sounds, smells, feelings of the surf. Eyes open, staying with the moment as I walked back. Yah, I could have done so much if I’d slipstreamed along the way, but that’s not the point.
The shuttle touched down as I approached the arrival area. This time I knew how to command it to give me an outside view as we left the planet. I sighed and shook my head -- damn nice Museum; have to visit some day!
We docked and I exited into low gee, my gear following. An interface met me and led me through the maze to the ship.
I’m not sure how it happened. I was slipstreaming, interfacing with a sixpack or more of Cep as we moved down the corridor in very low gee. I was in detailed discussions of instrumenting the primary and secondary FTL drives, and by extension, the metric and thruster drives. The Cep approach was to eliminate sensors that provided redundant data. But what was redundant? In “normal” operation, data from sensors placed at certain points should be highly correlated. As an example, voltage across a load and current through the load should be highly correlated -- Ohm’s Law -- linearly if the load is resistive. So you measure one parameter and calculate the other. It’s when the load isn’t resistive, but has reactive components, that things get interesting. Part of our exploration forked into an examination of detailed simulations, one of the Spider drive and the trap field generators, the second was the primary FTL drive in our ship, and my modified trap field.
Gee, big surprise -- their standard simulation techniques didn’t quite work! I’d been lucky, I guess, learning electronics before computers made simulations commonplace. Okay, some simulations are useful. But you need to understand what your simulation tools can and cannot do. In my time, the garden variety simulation tools could handle the banal and average, but fell down at the extremes. Same with current models of trap fields and FTL drives. And the Cep had evolved some pretty interesting techniques for FTL models, but they didn’t quite work for what we were exploring at the wild and wooly edges, and they admitted it. I gave them some of my new stuff; my models agreed with observed physical phenomena, and theirs didn’t. A long time ago, and a very, very long ways from here, I’d been taught, and then taught others that when your models don’t agree with what the thing on the bench is doing, oh by all means verify your measurements, but be ready to change your models. The Cep were pragmatists. They wanted more of my models and the analysis backing them, and they wanted more data, more measurements. They were now interested in instrumenting the snot out of our ship’s systems. Oh, and that’s going to take an extra six hours or so! Fine, do it!
What I didn’t notice was how the Cep immersed me, easing me into a different realm, until I was surprised to be looking at myself entering the lock of our ship!
Of course with that “Aha!” moment, the world shifted and I was “inside” me once more, looking at a cluster of silvery Cep around me.
But as I blinked and the world around me stopped wobbling, the Cep headed to different parts of the ship, some to the bridge, some to the engine room, some off to get more parts. I was politely asked to stay away from the bridge, the core, and the engine room.
That turned out to be easy -- as I turned the corner of a passageway to our cabin, Tundi surprised me. Really surprised me -- grabbed me and hauled me into the cabin! I wasn’t surprised for long, or dressed for long, either. I needed her; I was hungry for her. She wiped me out, and that’s what I needed, my mind shut off, focusing on the flesh, reveling in sensation. It was so good to just hold on and respond, ecstatically, to her, again and again.
At some point Donna joined us; they double-teamed me, keeping me wiped out. Glorious!
The three of us were in the galley eating when Kay swept in. Lucky I’d pretty much finished! She grabbed me and hauled me back to our cabin.
But not for the reason I thought...
“What’s going on? What did you do? I told you to stay out of trouble, and you...”
Eliza announced, “Cep wish to commence shakedown cruise in one hour.”
Kay looked up at the ceiling, almost cross-eyed.
“I’m glad to see you, too!” I told her, not knowing whether to laugh or run.
She sighed, then pulled me into her arms and to our bed.
After a few minutes of unwinding (we were still clothed), she asked, gently, “I expected you’d have an interesting time visiting the Museum -- tell me, please!”
I snuggled in. I’m a snuggler. “I had a great time! It’s a wonderful museum -- I should visit some time and look around!”
“What?” she asked, then kissed me on the head and gave me a squeeze, sighing.
“I visited the Space Propulsion section. Early on, I ran into a treatise on FTL systems. I got a copy from the Museum, and I guess I went overboard on it.”
“I’ll say!”
“It was fascinating! I learned so much from it -- and in the process, I corrected a lot of minor problems with it.”
“Minor? Do you know who those two were in the conference a few days ago?”
“Nope, but I’d guess they’re drive designers. I’d like to talk with them more and pick their brains.”
“Well, after what you did, they’d like to do the same with you!”
I chuckled and burrowed in.
“Tell me, come one...” she insisted, jiggling me after a bit.
“Okay... I re-did the treatise, and one of the Museum AIs convinced me to publish it. But the revised one, the one we put out, is still screwed up. I produced two more works. One is a complete rewrite of the taxonomy, casting everything into a common framework. When you do that, all sorts of things pop out at you. Like the little rabbit I pulled out of my hat for your colleagues. The other work deals with the history of drive evolution. There are still some holes in that, areas that need researched. The Museum AIs and some live researchers are still working on some of those questions, I guess.”
“You guess... The shockwaves are still propagating, dear... And then?”
I shrugged and kissed the side of a breast. “I was taking a break. I checked on the retrofit, got details on the drives, thought about it for a while, and figured out how to poison the primary, a generalization of the trap for the Spider drive. One of the nice things about pushing things into a common structure is that it shows little details like that. So I sent the Cep a note about plugging that hole. Shortly after that, folks started getting excited. I thought you were going to be back earlier?”
She laughed. “Oh you! The Cep contacted my ... colleagues when they got your note. Their first notion was to blow it off, but the CEP wouldn’t let them, and I suggested having you explain it firsthand. So you pop up and pull a series of rabbits out of your hat. Klaus has been flogging researchers and AIs, and finally figured out how you derived one of the things you showed them -- he’s convinced you’ve got more general forms, that what you showed us was an intermediate form?”
“Bright guy...” I told her.
“You’ve got more?”
I squeezed her; she was getting excited. “Yes, but that’s what I want to keep under my hat for a while. They believe me?”
“Oh, they sure as hell do, and so do the Cep -- what have you given them in the last few days?”
“Their simulations were for shit. I figured out how to do it better, that’s all, and gave them some of the pieces.”
“That’s all! I’ve never seen a Cep cluster gloat like this! Evidently when you came back to the ship, you gave them something, and a short time later, all Cep activity in the orbital ceased -- they pulled in the whole cluster to work on something, for an hour or so! And one of the first things they did when they snapped out of that was to send Klaus a detailed sim of his primary drive, with and without your mods...”
“Was it okay? The simulation?”
“Was it okay! It showed some oscillations that Klaus saw in testing but not in his sims, and your mods eliminated them entirely! I’ve been trying to calm him down! I don’t know if he wants to talk to you or kill you! And the Cep won’t give him the sim unless you release it!”
I sighed and linked to the Cep, giving them permission to release that part of the sim to Klaus. We argued for a bit about price. They suggested it was worth a small fortune. Okay, how about if we give folks access to the sim, let them run what they want on it? They brought in one of Klaus’ AIs, and we agreed a deal quickly. Two side channels popped up. On one, the Cep wanted to know if I had an analysis of the secondary FTL yet. Nope. On the other side channel, they had proposals for incorporating my new defensive structures into their drives, and wanted me to evaluate all the major drive systems they supplied to customers. I roped Kay into that one, slowing us all down a great deal. I thought my earlier deal with the ship builders gave them rights to certain aspects of the existing mods. Kay and the Cep agreed. We worked out a deal on that aspect. I told them the current set of mods were most likely not the last to be said, and a further set of revs might be forthcoming after I had some time to really work on the problem for a while. Fine, they’ll buy that, too! Send details on your other drives to Eliza, and I’ll quote you on those. Fine, done.
“Ugh!” Kay complained and shuddered as we popped back to the “real” world. “That was about as much as I could take!”
“We slowed down a lot for you,” I commiserated.
“Don’t rub it in,” she grumbled, but kissed the top of my head again.
Eliza alerted us to the schedule; we got up and made ourselves more or less presentable.
Kay had a tablet as well. She looked at hers, looked again in shock, then gave me a big hug.
“What did I do now?” I asked when she let me go.
“The retrofit? Even with pulling in favors, getting Klaus to give the Cep rights to his new baby, want to guess how much it cost?”
“Nope,” I told her.
She chuckled and shook her head. “Well, thanks to you, we’ve made back what the retrofit cost and we’re now making money. Between the drive mods, and what the Cep are charging others to run sims...”
“Really?”
She gave me a strange look. “The Cep are going to clean up, and they know it!”
I smiled, more of a smirk.
“Oh no -- I don’t like that look one damn bit. What else did you do?”
I shook my head. “The stuff I gave them was an intermediate form -- they haven’t seen the good stuff yet. And I feel like Ramanujan.”
“Who?”
“Mathematician back on Earth -- to a great extent self-taught, he advanced a number of fields, but was admittedly ignorant of other more basic areas.”
She smiled and hugged me again. “Perspective -- you’ve said it yourself. You’re coming in with a much different perspective, challenging long-held assumptions. And some of these egos need deflating.”
“Mine too,” I whispered.
She sighed. “Be careful, that’s all.”
“Of what?”
“Of a lot of things -- the Cep, in particular.”
“More of a hint?”
“Your nestmother is concerned. So am I. Keep causing trouble, and having fun.”
I smiled. “You can count on that.”
End of Part 4
rev 2007/08/26
On to Part 5
Time of Arrival 4
By silli_artie@hotmail.com
http://www.asstr-mirror.org/files/Authors/artie/www